Shimon Attie’s Sightings: The Ecology of an Art Museum is a multiple-channel, high-definition video installation that explores the relationship between works of art and museum visitors and staff. Attie’s particular interest is giving visual form to the heightened moment of mutual encounter between art viewer and art object. The exhibition is part of the museum’s Collection Connections series, which invites artists to create new work that reinterprets traditional objects from the FAMSF collections.

In the 1960s Yves Saint Laurent made an indelible mark on fashion with clothing emblematic of the new modernity. Yves Saint Laurent, organized by FAMSF and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Fondation Pierre Bergé-YvesSaint Laurent, explores the designs that made Saint Laurent famous, and his inspirations drawn from art, theatre, history, literature, and nature. This exhibition contains nearly 130 accessorized garments and sketches illustrating the lines, colors, and fundamentals of Saint Laurent’s work. This is the only U.S. venue.

Al Farrow’s current body of work continues to appropriate and reinterpret the traditional iconography of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious institutions and beliefs, and their historic links to complex political, cultural, and military issues and events. The Spine and Tooth of Santo Guerro (2007), is Farrow’s most important work in both technical and aesthetic terms. At first glance, this elaborate construction appears to be only a beautifully crafted scale model of a European Gothic cathedral, albeit not one that is historically identifiable.

Over the course of his meteoric career, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) used the medium of music to transform himself from fan, to record album designer, to producer, to celebrity night-clubber, to rock star. Warhol Live presents the first comprehensive exploration of Warhol’s work as seen through the lens of music. This exhibition brings together a wide variety of works depicting pop music royalty, including Elvis Presley, the Velvet Underground, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Liza Minnelli, Grace Jones, Deborah Harry of Blondie, and Michael Jackson.

Bouquets to Art celebrates its 25th year in 2009! Bouquets to Art is the largest fundraiser held to benefit the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and one of the country’s premier floral events. In addition to the nearly 150 floral exhibitions displayed in the de Young’s galleries, the week-long event features an entertaining speakers’ programs, elegant lunches and teas, and a spectacular gala night.

Just as abstraction has played a vital role in the history of modernist painting and sculpture, so too has it found expression in works by leading photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Toward Abstraction features the work of Edward Weston, Arthur Siegel, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Imogen Cunningham, and Robert Mapplethorpe. This exhibition showcases an important recent gift from the collection of David L. Davies and John D. Weeden, as well as selections borrowed from the Paul Sack Photographic Trust.